Typological Features Template for Ga
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Feature | Description |
Phonological Features | |
Vowel inventory | Ga has seven oral vowels: a i e ɛ u o ɔ and five nasal vowels: ã ĩ ũ ɔ̃ ɛ̃. Double consecutive copy vowels arise morphophonologically but otherwise there are no long vowels. |
Vowel harmony | Ga does not have ATR harmony. There are assimilation rules for sequences of two vowels.
Sequences of three vowels occur in the orthography but are always reduced in speech to two. |
Consonant inventory | In this field you describe the consonants of [your language] |
Tone | Ga has two tones and downstep. There are numerous lexical minimal pairs, in nouns and especially in verbs. There are also a few cases of high-low falling tone, usually on word-final syllables. They alternate with simple high tone in non-final contexts. |
Syllable Structure | Syllable types are CV, V and N, each bearing a tone. Every lexical stem contains at least one CV syllable. Many grammatical formatives are V or N syllables. |
Morpho-syntactic Features | In the following fields you describe some of the basic morpho-syntactic parameters of [your language] |
morphological classification (1) | Ga is moderately agglutinating in respect of verbs, although most singular nouns are simple morphemes. |
morphological classification (2) | Ga is generally head-marking at sentence and phrase levels, but case is not grammatically marked and there is no gender or nominal class. |
Nominal Phrases | In the following fields follows a description of some of the basic morpho-syntactic properties of nominal constituents |
syntactic structure | The linear ordering in the Noun phrase is as follows: Determiner-Possessor-Modifier noun-Head Noun-Adjective-Numeral-Indefinite Specifier-Deictic specifier-Definite marker-Quantifier-Intensifier |
nominal modification | The head of a nominal phrase may be modified by adjectives, numbers and the other elements specified above, and by relative clauses. |
nominal specification | In this field you indicate the basic types of specification. Does [your language] have determiners, demonstratives (deixis), numerals, quantifiers. Are there affixes expressing reference, deixis. Are there nouns or other elements expression a portion of a noun that the co-occur with? |
possession | Possession is expressed by simple juxtaposition Possessor-Possessum, except that if the Possessor is plural, the Possessum takes a prefix a-. |
pronominal system | In this field you indicate if [your language] has free pronoun forms? Are pronouns marked for their grammatical function (object versus subject pronouns)? Does your language have bound pronouns (affixes) or pronoun doubling? Are reflexives expressed by pronouns? |
Verbal Phrases | In the following fields serve for the description of some of the basic morpho-syntactic properties of verbal constituents |
word order | In this field you indicate the basic word order of your language (SOV, SOV ...) |
TAM | In this field you indicate which tense and/or aspects are morphologically or tonally marked; does [your language] make use of periphrastic tense or aspect constructions? |
infinitival forms | In this field you indicate if [your language] makes use of an infinitive marker? How many infinitival forms does your language have? |
verbal constructions | In this field you indicate if [your language] has ditransitive constructions, serial verb constructions or complex verb forms composed of several verbs. Does your language have so called light verbs, perhaps only used to indicate a certain tense or aspect? |
Adpositions | In this field you indicate if [your language[ makes use of prepositions or postpositions. Does your language have spatial nouns? Does your language use adpositions or particles to indicate grammatical relations between the verb and a nominal argument? |
Complementation | In this field you describe complementation strategies. Does [your language] make use of complementizers? |
Special Properties of [your language] | In this field you should mention properties of [your language] which did not fit into any of the other categories mentioned in this template |